Computer Graphics II: Rendering

CSE 168: About this course

Today, computer graphics is a central part of our lives, in movies, games, computer-aided design, virtual simulators, visualization and even imaging products and cameras. This course teaches the basics of computer graphics rendering, that is of great recent relevance in industry, and that apply to all of these domains.

Students will learn to create very realistic computer-generated images of 3D scenes, with ray and path tracing. The course follows on from CSE 167, Foundations of computer graphics, to delve into the details of high-quality physically-based rendering, creating the most realistic and beautiful computer-generated images, culminating in a state-of-the-art path tracer with multiple importance sampling. The projects will be as follows (each counting for 25% of the grade, a passing score will be 60%)

Raytracing (Homework 1)

Direct Lighting (Homework 2)

Path Tracing (Homework 3)

Importance Sampling (Homework 4)

Course staff

Ravi Ramamoorthi

Ravi Ramamoorthi is Ronald L. Graham Professor at UC San Diego. He has taught computer graphics more than 10 times at Columbia, UC Berkeley and UCSD, and has been honored with a number of awards for his research, including the ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award and by the White House with the PECASE (Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers). He taught CSE 167x as the first UC San DiegoX course on edX (and earlier UC Berkeley CS 184.1x as one of the first 9 classes on the edX platform). He has been recognized as one of 11 finalists for the inaugural edX Prize for Exceptional Contributions in Online Teaching and Learning.

We acknowledge the extraordinary efforts of UCSD CSE MS Student Andrew Bauer in developing the assignments and graders, and TAing the first local CSE 168 course, and the tutor, undergraduate student Guangyan Cai for developing the OptiX frameworks. Alexandr Kuznetsov will be maintaining the graders.